


Broken Mirrors

by Bibliotecaria_D



Series: After the End [7]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-10
Updated: 2012-10-10
Packaged: 2017-11-16 00:15:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliotecaria_D/pseuds/Bibliotecaria_D
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life keeps going after the Apocalypse. Vortex doesn’t want to die, even when he should.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <i>Blades is through waiting.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Mirrors

**Title:** Broken Mirrors  
 **Warnings:** Angst, desperation, and wrongness.  
 **Rating:** PG  
 **Continuity:** G1, _After the End_ AU  
 **Characters:** Blades, Vortex, Hoist  
 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn’t own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.  
 **Motivation (Prompt):** _Scenario: a vision or hallucination_ \+ Auction fic

**[* * * * *]**

The shadows multiplied. 

They weren’t shadows, but Vortex had nothing else to compare them to. A visual distortion implied hardware error, and a hallucination would have tripped error warnings in his software. The _change_ swept over his surroundings like fog creeping across the inside of his visor. It was a haze obscuring his vision, except that it wasn’t physical. It’d taken an entire orn to convince him of that, back on the moon with Soundwave watching him obsessively check room lights and polishing his visor. The gradual dimming wasn’t a problem with his optical sensors, nor the base lights. It’d taken Soundwave a dozen patient repetitions, speaking firmly to the confused helicopter until it finally sank in. The makeshift medic had patiently tested the sensors behind his visor one by one, and they came up as functional. He’d even replaced a few of the mech’s sensors with some of his own, swapping them to demonstrate to the Combaticon that they were in working order. 

The skirling, floating dark clouded Vortex’s vision, and Soundwave hadn’t been able to explain it away by scan or test. It’d started small, just like the whispers over the empty gestaltlinks had blinked only the odd moment of disassociated memories into the helicopter’s mind. The Constructicons had been more concerned with his continued complaints of thoughts that didn’t belong to him than periodic dimming of his vision, but they hadn’t found cause. The gestaltlinks were _dead_ , the hardware around his spark chamber functional but the corresponding sparks extinguished. Their initial exams had turned up nothing but superficial blast damage, because Bruticus had been turned just enough to shield Vortex from the blast that’d killed the other Combaticons. 

Lucky him.

Then there had been no more times for exams, no more Constructicons to give them, as Cybertron broke and burned and melted beneath the few refugees who’d struggled free of the dying planet. It’d been Soundwave who’d listened when Vortex mumbled complaints of corrupted memories and sight problems. And although Soundwave had barely enough repair experience to patch up the Decepticons who’d made it to the tiny moonbase, his diagnosis of the helicopter had been no different than the Constructicons’: post-traumatic stress. 

There hadn’t been a treatment. They’d tried several different things, but all had been nothing but wishful thinking. 

Now the shadows multiplied exponentially by every movement made around him, and Vortex could hardly remember where his memories ended, much less where they began. He knew that he’d forgotten so much, but not what he couldn’t remember. Soundwave had been replaced by Hoist, but Vortex couldn’t part the dense dull encroaching blackness to ask the Autobot medic for help. He didn’t know for what, but the obvious thing the medic could do was check his vision. Sometimes he could see the little green mech. Most of the time he didn’t. Most of the time, the last Combaticon sat in the isolation ward and watched the shadows multiply, and he couldn’t see anyone for the dark.

The colors dulled first. No matter how he refreshed his input and rebooted visual systems, the colors lost vividness. Around the edges of his field of vision, even the stark words of his HUD paled to gray. It got harder to read them, because everything beyond them paled as well. It wasn’t like a medbay was particularly colorful to begin with, but when the tangerine orange walls leeched to a pastel powder hue heading rapidly toward grey, well…it wasn’t an improvement. He’d never been fond of the Autobots’ idea of interior decoration, but he found himself staring hard, trying to pick out contrasts and different shades. He pored over the horrid tangerine color, analyzing what it looked like, what it reminded him of, what it evoked in him -- because color was important when its absence loomed.

His vision had become a tightening funnel. Straight ahead, he could still see colors, although the highlights were muted. Metal didn’t shine, and that was wrong. He _knew_ it was wrong, although shaking his head only made the whole room devolve into rings of black shadows and movement. The colors didn’t run. They just dissolved away, eaten by grey, and his vision was fine. It was his perception of the data that had _changed_. The software had no errors, and the hardware worked perfectly. His mind was shutting down, refusing to see the proper color saturations. It was separating him from the outside world by reducing visual input to an incorrectly interpreted picture, and Vortex just dumbly watched black pixilation start at the corners. Layers and layers of shadows overlaid until they blotted everything out.

He remembered how the world should be, and it wasn’t like that anymore.

He should have been frightened by that. 

“Aren’t you gonna **do** anything?” Blades asked him, and Vortex had seen him without seeing him at first. His inability to pay attention was handicapping him further. When he could see, he lost interest and didn’t look. 

Blades wouldn’t let him look away. The shadows had deepened to the point that they swallowed the movement of things actually there to be seen, but not the unseen. The red-and-white Protectobot stood out against the shadows that weren’t there because he wasn’t there, either. The Combaticon was strangely okay with that, but then again, he was used to Starscream, too. It’d taken him a long time sitting here on the repair berth to remember why it wasn’t normal to see dead mechs. 

The facts free-floating through his head were hard to connect, and it took so much effort to keep a thought more than a fleeting instant. Blades had to repeat himself a few times before the Combaticon managed to catch all his words, and the Decepticon just stared blankly when he did. Do…something? What? Could something be done? The little medic that he sometimes saw fussing around him did things, didn’t he? And before him, Soundwave had tried…things. As had the Constructicons. Vortex knew that, although he couldn’t recall what exactly had been tried. 

He just remembered that they hadn’t worked. They hadn’t worked, just like hooking up a dying spark to his own hadn’t stopped -- hadn’t saved --

There was someone he couldn’t remember, and Vortex’s numbed spark lurched in his chest. His memories scattered glass through his head, the brief image of a flickering spark behind a broken windshield, and he had _tried._ He had tried something, and it hadn’t worked. 

But he couldn’t…he couldn’t remember what it’d been.

His Autobot counterpart made a frustrated noise and gestured at the other berths in the room. “You’re gonna just sit there and, what, go into statis? You’re gonna **let** this happen to you?”

The Combaticon swung his head around slowly, fumbling the motor relays with uncooperative mental fingers. The physical difficulty was new. He didn’t feel much in general, but grasping after his own bodily functions brought back memories of when Shockwave had prepared his spark for extraction. He’d spent a joor strapped to a table, side-by-side with the others, chest plates forced open, and he’d been confused. They’d been aware of their sentence, but not what would actually happen once they were dragged from their prison cells. Shockwave hadn’t deigned to explain the procedure, so all the helicopter had known was the odd sensation of being one step removed from his own body. It was only when Brawl’s shriek cut off mid-extraction and Vortex had seen the spark casing that he’d understood what was going on.

There were bodies on the berths, here, although there were no straps. Maybe he should have felt alarmed by the similarities, but he couldn’t even recall the original emotions anymore. Fear and anticipation had melted away, as lost to the dark as color.

The feeling of waiting remained the same. He didn’t know for what, he didn’t know why, but he knew he was waiting. 

The ‘bot who eventually came through the door at the end of the door was green, not purple. At some point, he must have figured out that Vortex’s processor cycles weren’t synchronizing with his spark pulse anymore. He faded around the edges, ringed with shadowy movements and bleaching of color when he checked on the other bodies in the room, but he kept his movements steady and very, very slow. Vortex still couldn’t hear whatever he tried to say, the white noise and chipmunk chatter drowning in the dim haze creeping over him. He tended to forget that he’d been trying to listen, too, only to realize long afterward that the words had stopped. 

So long as the Autobot stayed visible, however, Vortex’s head turned to follow him. The dot of clarity in the middle of his vision narrowed, diameter shrinking, and soon he wouldn’t be able to tell green from purple. It would all be grey. The colors would disappear.

It was important to keep the colors. The Combaticon floundered when trying to think _why_ , but the highlights were already gone. Soon the shadows would take over, and there wouldn’t even be grey. It would be black and white. And then? Just black. That would be…bad, right?

“You have to do something,” the flicker of brilliant, pure red at the corner of his vision demanded, and he couldn’t ignore it. Blades was so bright against the darkness. “You **have** to!”

Hissing silence answered that demand. If the Combaticon had been able to think of a reply, he’d lost any motivation to say it aloud. Instead, Vortex simply sat watched the Autobot medic. He saw the mech without really comprehending his presence. He only wanted to keep the green centered in his narrowing tunnel vision. That was the only goal he could stay focus on.

“If you won’t do something, **I** will,” declared near his helm, loud enough that audios would have burst. 

It shook Vortex in a way real noise couldn’t anymore. The shadows shook slightly, and his mind rattled against the inside of his head.

He lost sight of the green. That washed tepid dismay through him briefly.

There was a pressure on his arm. There had been pressure for quite a while, now, but only now did Vortex finally react to it. He turned his head to look at where he thought the pressure was coming from. He wasn’t sure, but he guessed. The movement felt jerky, the helicopter fighting to hold onto bodily commands. Connecting physical sensation to a specific location seemed very finicky. He didn’t know why he bothered. The searing white-and-red colors beside him kept goading him onward, perhaps. 

Red-and-white, but weird. Blades kept blinking on and off. He was blurry, like looking through flames, or like Vortex was seeing the Autobot’s colors through the haze that coated everything. Under the shadows, he could almost see another color. Grey, yes, but -- ? Green. There were hands insistently pulling at his arm, but he wasn’t sure who they belonged to. 

It took him yet more time to orient the hole in the shadows. His visor worked fine, but he was searching for a pinprick of green in a grey world. Green, not purple. That seemed…important, once upon a memory. Because the form under the red-and-white burn was pallid green, but the actions could have been done by someone purple. The hands of the medic were Blades’ colors, doing Shockwave’s actions. Vortex watched, confused and struggling to think why. 

The body on the berth beside him had an open chest. This was more than memory, and it should have been horrible. He remembered that. He remembered the way their chest plates had been peeled back, efficient but terrible because such things were not done, and he hadn’t understood. He didn’t understand now. The shadows blurred the medic, black rings of motion, but Blades stood out so clearly. Blades’ hands pulled at him, but they weren’t the Autobot helicopter’s hands. Were they? Vortex didn’t know.

He followed the pressure on his arm, the pinprick of living green and the flaming brilliance of the dead, because it wasn’t purple. He was moving, and he didn’t know why. Vague unease stirred, far under the thick shell covering his spark. 

“Stand up! Frag you to the Pit, stand up!” 

The world had become grey sullenly edged with black, the shadows kept breeding and eating him alive, but he stumbled to his feet because he could still feel them. The haze roiled as motion piled up, a thousand images in through optical sensors that couldn’t communicate with a mind to register them. He was blind and isolated, falling into statis while standing, and Blades _shrieked_ at him.

“No! **No!** I don’t give a flying wingnut if you go under, but not now, not when -- !”

Not when what? 

The shadows bloomed, blotting everything out, but the pressure on his arm kept pulling. The green medic’s hand with the dead mech’s urgency, and only when Blades shouted did Vortex figure out what he was trying to do. 

“Protectobots: Form Defensor!”

The colors were gone, what little Vortex could see had _changed_ , but it was still too late. He saw the open chest and the spark chamber, with its pristine gestaltlink hardware, and he _understood_. 

Blades, like Shockwave before him, ignored his screaming.

**[* * * * *]**


End file.
